I don't think this is true. Fedora certainly does not. Not in F10, not in F11.

And quite frankly, even if you then _manually_ put 'relatime' in /etc/fstab, the default Fedora install will totally ignore it. Why? Because it mounts the root partition while using initrd, and totally ignores /etc/fstab.

In other words, not only do distributions not do it, but you can't even do it by hand afterwards the sane way in the most common distro!

There really is reason for the kernel to just say "user space has sh*t for brains, and we'd better change the default - and if some distro really _thinks_ about it, and decides that they really want old-fashioned atime, let them do that".

Because right now, I do not believe for a moment that any distro that defaults to "atime" has spent lots of effort thinking about it. Quite the reverse. They probably default to "atime" because they spent no time AT ALL thinking about it.

> It wouldn't be hard to add an "atime" option to turn on atime updates, > and make either "noatime" or "relatime" the default. This is a simple > patch to fs/namespace.c